


Can't Hide

by SenkoWakimarin



Series: Let Them Eat Flesh [6]
Category: The Punisher (TV 2017)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Zombies, Awkward Pawing, Cannibalism, M/M, sorta - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-03
Updated: 2018-12-03
Packaged: 2019-09-06 05:23:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,849
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16826011
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SenkoWakimarin/pseuds/SenkoWakimarin
Summary: Frank's, technically, no longer a wanted man. There's a lot of implications to that, and he's comfortable dealing with all of them head on, excepting the most tangible.





	Can't Hide

The way it all shakes out officially, Frank is, by technicality, a free man. A man with a life ahead of him. 

So maybe, by the same technicality, he’s living as Pete Castiglione full time again. Maybe ‘Frank Castle’ is still a wanted man who’d likely be shot on sight rather than arrested if he were to show back up. Maybe Pete was set up with a pretty desperate situation as an infected ex-vet with no family ties. That was all just detail, Frank knew who he was, and life was never easy, certainly never fair.

Part of his agreement with the feds was that Pete was registered with the CDC as infected. That meant he had to find housing so the CDC could send his state-approved ‘medical rations’ (a ridiculously sterile name in Frank’s opinion) to his door each week. Except he couldn’t pay rent without a job, and legally he couldn’t be hired without both disclosing his infected status and providing proof of completed CDC registry -- which requires him having an address on file.

When David offered him a place to stay, he accepted. There weren’t a lot of options that weren’t actively self-destructive, and because David seemed to understand that Frank was not intending it to be a long term solution. David is good at taking things in stride, as much as he might want to cling; David knows how to read Frank and understands that his desire to care for himself is not a slight.

It’s better than being on the streets, which is where a lot of infected, especially the vets end up. Disowned by their families, friends cut ties or ghosted, a good chunk of the homeless population relied on massive charitable outreach for survival. If you didn’t come in early on a handout day, odds were you missed the meal, and most charities weren’t funded well enough to feed folks more than once a week. It was a problem, a kettle getting ready to boil over, and Frank didn’t want to add to it. 

Frank had started reading up on the situation more aggressively. It seemed important, since he’d chosen to survive like this. What he discovers is that the situation is full of all kinds of weird obfuscation, misdirection, and outright lies, many propagated by the government. He’s not terribly surprised to learn this now that he’s paying attention, but he is disgusted. A communicable mutation (they called it a virus in most circles, but technically it wasn’t -- Frank didn’t understand the science enough to really give a goddamn) that affected over a quarter of the world’s population and nearly a third of Americans, but the government chose to plod along with bureaucratic bullshit rather than extend real outreach and help.

He knew people in positions of power were inherently selfish; they expose this regularly, with just about every action the make or word they say. But the idea that something like this, something that was changing the very scope of the world, could be used to shove people down further, to profit -- false cures, baseless vitamin supplements and other pseudo-medical treatments for the infected, not to mention the bodies thrown into the prison system, used as labour and then processed out as nothing. It was enough to make a man sick.

Not that Frank needed another reason to get sick. This soon after the initial infection, he was still liable to puke most things he swallowed. Every resource he can find, including David, says that this is normal, so he doesn’t worry much about it. 

Sitting with David while David applies for new positions with tech companies he’s vetted and approved of, Frank feels hungry, and tired, and cold. His body puts out so little heat now that it doesn’t matter how thick the hoodie is he’s wearing, it never seems to get warm. The electric blanket he sleeps under helps, and surprisingly so does David, even though he’s just as cold. 

Usually he’d be out. The sun, even in winter, helps warm them up, and he needs to find a job himself. That means, for him, looking at what crews need a heavy lifter. It’s easier, in his opinion, to pound the pavement and search than it is to file applications online. 

Today though is a delivery day, which means both of them have to be home. That’s the law -- can’t leave the packages by the door, no, they have to be signed for at the door. It’s such a thing that delivery days are expected to be days taken off work for those employed, which of course made employers prefer non-infected applicants because they had more viable work days. Just one more way the infected were encouraged to slip through the cracks, to give up. No wonder suicide rates among the infected were so high.

Frank knows he’s lucky. David has a family to look out for, two kids and a wife. Bringing Frank here and giving him a place to stay is inviting trouble, even with Frank on his best behaviour. Frank doesn’t know how to state his appreciation without making things awkward.

He tenses when the doorbell rings, and David touches his shoulder in absent reassurance as he gets up to answer it. They’ve been cohabiting long enough that David understands his tells, but goddamnit, it’s just a doorbell -- it shouldn’t be the thing that trips his fight or flight. The fact that he still doesn’t have that under his own iron control burns him, makes his skin feel tight and prickly with anger, but at least it’s all directed inward. 

Lurking behind David, he watches David sign for his package, and then David steps aside so Frank can talk to the delivery person. The bright eyed girl who greets him with bubbly good cheer asks first for his ID, which he provides, and then she frowns and hums and flips through her papers until she finds what she’s looking for -- goddamn bureaucratic bullshit -- and grins at him. Frank’s hungry. He doesn’t particularly want to be standing in the cold watching some twenty-something minimum wage earner scurry back to her neat white truck with the CDC logo emblazoned on the cab doors, digging around in the back until she jumps out and returns with a little, unremarkable white box with his registry number on it. 

“Sorry about that, Mr. Castiglione! We don’t usually do two deliveries to a door when the last names are different,” she says, and laughs. She’s obviously not infected -- he’d be shocked if the CDC hired infected personnel to do this particular job -- but unlike most of the people Frank has seen deal with infected folks, she seems utterly relaxed. He makes himself smile back at her and mutter something to the effect that it’s okay. She shows him where to sign on the form and gives him back his ID with the nondescript box. “It’ll go smoother next week! First deliveries are always the worst, you know? But I’ll remember next time. I’m Nickie, by the way.”

She offers her hand and he takes it, shakes it, wishes she would leave. It’s been a long few weeks while he was ‘processed’, meaning none of the meat his body needed was delivered. He’d last eaten at the hospital the feds had insisted he needed to be seen at before okaying his CDC registration. 

David had, of course, offered to share, but Frank had declined, first because it didn’t seem so bad, being a little hungry, then both subsequent weeks after out of stubborn principle. 

Maybe Nickie realizes that, because her little laugh when she retracts her hand is decidedly self-conscious. “Well, see you guys next week! Have a great day, Mr. C, David!” 

Frank shuts the door and locks it as she starts her truck up again. David’s hand on his shoulder is a comfort, drawing him back to the kitchen. David hums as he sets the box down and smiles awkwardly. 

And there is a strange sort of awkwardness, one which Frank strives very hard not to acknowledge. He is hungry. He doesn’t want to think, he doesn’t want to moralize, he doesn’t want to consider any facts further than eating what’s been handed to him. He sure as shit doesn’t want to acknowledge that the only reason he’s here is because David saved his life. All of which he’s  _ painfully _ aware David is thinking about.

David has a tendency to think too damn much. 

He also tends to let his thinking go down the worst possible tracks. For instance, he’s made it very clear in the repeated apologies he’s tried to voice that he doesn’t consider giving Frank his blood (saving his life) any kind of gift because it had led to Frank getting sick. And he expects Frank to be angry with him over that. Like Frank has any room to complain. 

He sighs and sets his box on the counter by David’s. Side by side they are just about indistinguishable. Frank wonders if the meat inside will look the same too. He knows they harvest it mostly from prisons; he’d had to sign a bunch of wavers when he’d been sent upstate, acknowledging that his body, unless approved to be claimed by family (which of course, Frank did not have) would been retained as property of the United States Federal Government, to be ‘disposed of as was deemed fitting’. Fancy bullshit saying if you couldn’t talk your family into petitioning to claim your corpse, you were going to be made into cutlets.

‘Medical Rations’ indeed.

“I’m hungry,” He says flatly, inclining his head toward the boxes while David toys with something on his phone. David might not be able to blush with his circulation still muted, but his embarrassment is easy enough to read in other ways. 

David grins at him, all sheepish and apologetic. “Right. Yeah. Sorry, just -- I’m used to waiting.”

Of course he is. He’d never, not even the times when Frank had let him literally carve into his back for his meal, let Frank see him eat. David couldn’t process cooked meat at all; it sat heavy and sour in his gut until he threw it up and, according to him, didn’t even taste good anymore. So he was stuck with raw things, and like a lot of people in his position, he was mildly embarrassed about eating in front of anyone.

But especially Frank. Frank tries not to read into that too much.

“I can go stand outside ‘n eat if you want. It’s not that cold.”

It was that cold, but if it would keep things from being any weirder than they already were, Frank would move to the backyard for the duration of his stay.

“No no no,” David says quickly, moving back toward the counter. “It’s just, you know, habit. We can eat now.”

In the hospital, when they’d given him anything to eat -- which, in spite of his infected status and subsequent dietary restrictions, was done at the same designated meal times as the rest of the hospital had -- they’d provided a plate and utensils. Raw beef, that’s all it had been, and both meals had made him sick anyway. David opens his box and hums thoughtfully, seeming pleasantly surprised.

“Used to be, they sent a little like, slab of steak. Cut it up yourself, whatever; it was like, just processed enough that you didn’t think too hard about it.” He reaches into the box and pulls out a little vacuum sealed bag of bite sized chunks. “This is  _ way _ nicer.”

Even now, though Frank has dealt with plenty of dead bodies, including having had to carve David portions of meat from them, he expects to be disgusted. After all, he’s never been asked to actually eat the stuff before. It’s easy, though, to pretend the meat he pulls out of his box is just cold beef, maybe particularly dark pork. The knowledge is never far enough away, true, for him to ever forget that it’s human meat in his hand.

Maybe it helps that Frank was raised Catholic, he thinks with a rueful smirk. He was raised with ‘this is my flesh, this is my blood’ ringing in his ears, communion a rite he was pressed to endure every week. There is no holiness to this meal, he’s not blasphemous enough to suggest that, but the concept doesn’t trouble him. Weirdly, it’s the lack of troubled conscience that gets him worked up -- he knows how upsetting what he’s about to do is, fundamentally, to most people in society. Cannibalism, even by necessity, is looked at as barbarous. 

But he’s  _ hungry _ and he’s fishing a chunk out of the bag, popping a piece of half-frozen meat into his mouth and chewing before he can distract himself with guilt and uncertainty he should be feeling but isn’t. It would be better warm, he thinks immediately, and tries extremely hard to ignore the memory of David tearing a bite out of his back with his teeth. 

Had David liked that better than the cold, processed meat they were delivered? He remembers David pressing up against his back, licking the blood off his skin, hard and shivering against him, and wills the thought forcefully away. That part of their relationship is over. Laying together on a sun drenched bed and napping in the strange, slow warmth they can create together is about as wild as Frank intends to let things get between them now that David is back with his family.

On that, he’s firm, even when he feels David staring at him, his eyes keen in that way that gave away a hell of a lot more than Frank thinks David realizes. It’s certainly not a chaste look, whatever else it is. 

Chewing on his second chunk of meat, Frank watches David start moving around him. Another tell of David’s moods; when he had that weird blend of hungry/horny all hot in his head, he moved around Frank like a big cat circling a tethered goat; like he was trying not to startle him even if he couldn’t run that far. It’s very predatory, and David prefers to touch Frank from behind, sliding in against his spine, pressing cool lips to the back of his neck, incongruous sweetness against the very pointedly bloody-minded nature of his approach.

David is touching him before he can think of how to prevent that without being an asshole about it. It’s just a hand, pressing against his shoulder and sliding around the firmness of his arm, and then it’s all at once all of David, his chest flush against Frank’s back, face against the joint of neck and shoulder. Frank sighs, and David hums, holding Frank in a hug that’s on the very knife’s edge between sweet and inappropriate.

Lips press to his neck, and without meaning to Frank tilts his head -- it’s reflex, hardwired in after too many associations with the smell of this man pressed to him -- giving David the room to kiss at the skin. Which just makes him feel like more of an asshole, really, when he says, forcing his tone to be stern, “I’m trying real hard not to let this get weird, David.”

He’s hungry. He hasn’t eaten anything that didn’t make him want to vomit almost immediately in almost a month. It’s a damn long time and he knows he needs to eat, which is excuse enough to tell David to keep his hands to himself. There’s a lot of other reasons, Sarah being the chief one that comes to Frank’s mind, that they cannot allow any kind of slipping back into old routines. Food didn’t mean physicality, certainly didn’t mean fucking now. Not in this place.

And he knows David understands all that. Knows he still takes it kind of personal that Frank isn’t open to this any more. It’s something that, were Frank better at talking about things, he’d want to have out with David -- how they felt about it all now that it was behind them. Who regretted what -- and who didn’t regret what. But Frank’s not good at talking, and he’s certainly not good at talking about that kind of shit, and so he just stands still as David deflates and pulls away from him.

Maybe it would have been better, he reflects, if he had gone out into the yard to eat. Because he can feel David’s eyes from across the counter still on him as David opens his own bag and starts eating. Frank knows endings, has partaken in so many he might as well consider himself a connoisseur of them; he knows the feeling of something -- a life, an emotion, a relationship -- drawing to a close.

This doesn’t feel like that.

Whatever else is happening, David has his eyes bright and hungry on Frank still, and while today he can put a wall of bland indifference between them, shore it up with his hunger and general fatigue, sooner rather than later there will be nowhere left for him to hide. 


End file.
